When you have finished developing your incredible website, the next step is to share it with the world by submitting it to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. After publishing your website for all the world to see, your content may start to show up in Google straightaway. However, for that to happen, you should know that it requires you to do a little bit more than just clicking the “Publish” button. If you don’t know or are not sure of how to submit your site to Google, this article is a good read for you. The paragraphs below will walk you through the things that you need to do so as to get your website added to Google’s listings.

How Does Google Find The Content Of Your Website?

According to Google, the search engine crawls billions of web pages using a large set of computers. The crawler is known as Googlebot, and it basically begins with a list of the URLs of web pages which were generated from the previous crawls and then adding sitemap data to those pages. As the Googlebot is crawling, it looks for new websites, updates or changes to the already existing web pages, as well as any broken links.If your sitemap contains some new pages, Google will find them, crawl through the content and then possibly list them (the pages) in the search results basing on its 200 (and more) ranking factors. As soon as the Googlebot has finished crawling, the results are supplied to Google’s index. Any updated content or new websites will get listed accordingly. When the results are being processed, Google inspects the information on your web page, for instance: title tags, alt tags, meta description, and more. If one of your pages contains dynamic content, the crawler may fail to read it, and instead, crawl the default version. You are recommended to optimize your default version for search. With the help of the Google’s crawler, there may never be a need for you to submit your site because it will automatically be discovered. However, this approach has a disadvantage, and that is, it relies on the timeframe of Google to crawl and index the content of your website, and this may take longer than you would like.

Checking to See If Your Site Is Included in Google’s Listings

If you want to see whether your website is listed in Google, simply start your search with: “Site: Yoursitename.com”. If there isn’t any content that has been indexed yet for your site, Google will inform you that your search didn’t match any results. In such a case, creating a sitemap which can be submitted to Google should be your next step.

The Time It Takes To Index Content

A content marketer and SEO specialist by the name of Casey Henry wondered how long it takes Search Engines to index web content. In order to satisfy his curiosity, he did a test to find out the amount of time that Google & yahoo takes to crawl & index content. From the results, Casey discovered that it took Yahoo and Google 1,773 minutes and 1,375 minutes respectively to just crawl his content. Alternatively, when he submitted an updated sitemap, he discovered that it took Yahoo and Googlebot 245 minutes and 14 minutes respectively to visit the page. This implies that if you submit an updated sitemap after launching a new site or adding a few web pages, you may be able to start generating traffic as well as conversions on that very same day.

How to Submit Your Website to Google

If you have a new website, before submitting it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url, you must first verify your ownership in Google Search Console. On the other hand, if you are updating an existing website with a few new pages, you should update the sitemap so as to make sure that your new content is listed as soon as possible. To update a sitemap, sign in to Google search console, go to the Crawl tab, and then to Sitemaps. While you are there, submit your updated sitemap so that Google can start crawling it at the earliest possible time. You may or may not need to submit an updated sitemap whenever you publish a page. If you are dealing with content which is critically important and needs to be indexed within the shortest time possible, it would be best to go through the submission process manually. On the other hand, if you are simply making small corrections or changes to pages, you may wait for Google to crawl those pages and update its index.

WebDesign499 is a national Web Design & SEO Agency based out of Wellington, FL. They can be reached at (561) 506-0398.